This article is going to focus on a different part of the RPG business. I
have a science fiction game I am working on, I have Robots in the game and
since I am using Open Game License content such as the D20 Modern Future Robots
rules I have run up against some issues with that aging ruleset.

Firstly I want to create a robot that flies and has a camera for taking
video, there are other ideas for flying robots that illuminate the user's path
and free up their hands for holding weapons and equipment, but right now lets
take the flying robot camera as our example. This was one of my early ideas for
a Recon Drone, we'll ignore his tiny Arms and Legs and the fact that this one
uses Anti-Gravity propulsion for right now.

Lets say that I want a Diminutive sized Armature Frame for 200 Credits, I
have converted all of the Wealth Check values into cash because the game
operates on a Cash basis and not Wealth checks.

Further lets say that because I want the robot to be versatile and walk
alongside the player I need it to be able to Hover as well as Fly, this makes
Rotors seem the obvious choice among various low tech approaches available to
me. Rotors cost One Quarter of the basic Frame cost or 50 Cr in this
example.

This Robot doesn't need any Manipulators such as Hands.

Our Robot doesn't need any Armor, we don't expect it to get into any fights
and any armor we'd put on it would just weigh it down.

For the purposes of this exercise our Robot is more of a Drone piloted by
its operator and doesn't need any programming, but it will need some extras in
order to be remotely piloted. According to the Future Robots text I need a
Audio Video Transmitter 650 Cr, Remote Control Unit 500 Cr and a Robolink 650
Cr.

So I can understand why I need a Remote Control Unit, you can't exactly Fly
a remote controlled anything without the remote, and I can see why you'd need
the Robolink because the remote needs to control something. What I don't see is
why you need to have the Audio Video Transmitter.

People have been flying Remote Controlled Aircraft since the 1800s, First
Person View flying didn't come about until the last decade, so while it is
Modern and one might even say Futuristic it isn't absolutely necessary to see
things from the Robots point of view as long as you can see where the Robot is.
If I were building a Toy Race Car this probably wouldn't even be something you
would consider. For most of the history of Remote Controlled Aircraft even
putting cameras on them wasn't very practical so a case could be made for
eliminating the Class I Sensor and the AV Transmitter.

So lets start out with my Minimalist Diminutive Flying Robot

Diminutive Frame 200 Cr

Rotors 50 Cr

Remote Control Unit 500 Cr

Robolink 650 Cr

That's 1,400 Cr for a Flying Drone I can fit in the palm of my hand and fly
by remote. I can buy this exact thing (Size Fine, Diminutive because of its
weight) from Amazon for $36.21 with Free Shipping in the form of the Hubsan X4
H107L Remote Controlled Quadcopter. It is a very basic Quad and it is often
used by hobbyists to learn how to fly before buying and wrecking more expensive
Quadrotor vehicles like the DJI Phantom which costs about $1,000 new.

Now the X4 is pretty fragile, people break the rotors, people break the
frame and have to replace parts of the shell and so I might give them the
Fragile Quality and not a lot of Hit Points (maybe 2) despite that, it is not
that bad a flying platform. Hobbyist equipment like this only gets about 7
minutes of flight time, but tell your average player he has 70 rounds of flight
and see what they can do with that. Tell your average hobbyist that and he buys
extra batteries.

For $51.85 I can buy an X4 (H107C) with a video camera built in, but it only
records what I fly it at, and I still have to fly the Quad by line of sight and
retrieve the video from the memory card before the battery runs out. Some
people only report 5 minutes of flight time, so 2-3 minutes out, 2 minutes
back, but still how long does it take to see how many guards the bad guys have,
how high the fences are, if there are guard dogs, barbed wire, or anything else
a PC would try to scout in 50 rounds. Now the X4 with video doesn't transmit
any video back to me so still no 650 Cr AV Transmitter, but we do have that
pesky 275 Cr Class I Sensor and a 275 Cr AV Recorder. So now we are up to a
1,950 Cr robot from the Future that does what a $52 toy from 2014 does.

I'm not bagging on the guys from WotC that wrote these rules, Smartphones
and Commodity electronics have done a lot to change the world we live in from
the world of 2004. However as a guy that wants to write a somewhat convincing
view of the future I need robots and phones that aren't less capable than
things the players might have at home or with them at the table.

So now back to our Futuristic vision, lets take a look at First Person View
flyers, our friends at Hubsan have done it again, they have a version of the X4
(H107D) that comes equipped with the same color camera from the earlier camera
equipped version and it also will transmit a live video feed back to the
remote. In order to do this you need one transmitter for flying and one for
video, they operate at separate radio frequencies and thus they double the
amount of radio gear on the Quad and the amount of electronics in the Remote
Control Unit which now includes a full color video screen. this version also
includes a larger battery pack which still has about 7 minutes of flight time,
but has to power more gear. Add our AV Transmitter for 650 Cr to bring our
total up to 2,600 Cr, how much does Hubsan charge?

$162.99

For an RPG Character in the Future 2,600 Cr, that's a chunk of your starting
cash or the reward for a few good missions. For a kid living in 2014, $163
that's a couple weekends mowing lawns.

So this brings me to several conclusions;

The Robolink is overpriced because for what is over 2x the cost of the
Frame, I get it included in the base cost of my $36 RC Quad, or even the $15 RC
Helicopters and RC Racecars out there. Maybe 500 Cr is worth it if you have a
1:1 scale tank or starfighter and you have some Encrypted Signals so people
can't hack your connection and you use Frequency Hopping to avoid enemies
jamming your multimillion dollar warmachine. At the low end we don't need all
that. I also notice that in the SRD you couldn't build a Predator drone which
was available at the time the SRD was written because Robolinks were limited to
1,000 ft range. So maybe we need to let control units just be control units and
communications technologies like Satellite uplinks be their own thing instead
of trying to bundle one thing with another.

Remote Control Unit is overpriced, Hubsan replacement basic controllers are
$20, the difference between a First Person View flyer without the remote and
the full kit is $70 so even the full featured remote with twice the electronics
and video display is basically $70. All the same caveats apply you could have
high end military grade remote drone flying setups but there is nothing in the
rules at the low end.

The Audio Video Transmitter is not a requirement and should be decoupled
from the Robolink at the low end. A Robot with a Robolink and no AV Transmitter
could be paired with a low end Remote Control Unit. Since the Robolink only
controls the robot, its costs should not go down significantly because of this
only the prices of the Remote Control Unit should be changed to have various
tiers related to their complexity. Robolink prices should still go down because
they are batcrap crazy.

There need to be changes to the prices of Robot Frames if they use
replaceable batteries instead of large integrated batteries or internal power
sources. I had already decided to do this for the Inflateable and Memory
Material robots to make them fold up smaller and have more limited use.

There need to be changes to the prices of Robot Frames if they are made out
of injection molded or 3D printed plastic that can break easily instead of
assuming a rugged metal frame as the baseline. I had already decided to do this
for the Inflatable and Memory Material robots to make them fold up small enough
to be carried in a backpack.

The Diminutive Armature Frame I chose comes with a 5 Strength, it would be
lightly encumbered by a load of 16 pounds or less, the X4 Quads can't carry an
extra ounce without throwing off their center of gravity and running down their
batteries but they would still do the job I need them to and that is be my eye
in the sky, maybe replacing the Futuristic Ranger's Animal Companion.

Which brings me to my last point, I have to pay more money to build a Remote
Controlled Robot than a Semi-Autonomous Robot that responds to commands?
Because my players might be used to the Ranger, Druid or Wizard having their
Familiar/Animal Companion fly over the enemy camp and either signal based on a
Trick it knows or share its senses with its master through Magic. A Robot with
an AV Transmitter should be able to do all of this, but as it stands it is more
expensive for me to build a Remote Control Drone to do this than add a Camera
Transmitter to my Flying Autonomous Robot? So I think there need to be changes
to the prices of Robot Frames if they are Remote Controlled instead of
something that has Animal Intelligence and can autonomously follow rudimentary
commands.

After reading the Pathfinder Technology Guide I have decided to build all
Robots as Dumb Robots or Drones and then incorporate various degrees of AI to
them in order to create Animal Intelligence and more useful robots.

I did wonder about making a Humanoid Robot that could walk alongside my
Player and cross any Terrain the player could and found myself wondering why I
could buy Hands for Robots but the rules didn't say anything about buying Arms.
You can buy Claws, Hands, Pincers and all of those things let you attack (the
game mechanical effect) and yet there must be an assumption that Arms come
along with the price of the Hand you are buying. Even worse Medium sized Robots
are limited to 2 Manipulators, so can I never build as Human sized Robot with
both Hands and Jaws or should I assume that Hands and the Arms they are
attached to come in Pairs? Because that would wreck my Demolitions Drone
ideas.

Heck it would even wreck my Underwater Demolition Drone ideas.

Maybe I should just assume the cost of the Manipulators is the cost for a
Pair of Claws, Hands or Pincers and that I could just buy one for Half the cost
of a set.

All in all there are going to be a lot of changes going on with the robot
rules to make the costs of the cheap, disposable future more in line with the
cheap disposable now and there are going to be some upgrades to the basic
electronics so you hopefully don't feel let down because your character's
commlink isn't as gee-whiz amazing as your new smartphone.

The images above is from an upcoming game about Pirates, Space Pirates!

I hope this helps some of you out there working on your own RPG projects.